Cursor gives cloud agents subscriptions, /goal and subagent VMs

Cursor's August 19 changelog reworks its cloud agents around persistence. The update lets agents "pick up work in response to events, hold a goal until it's met, and stay on course through long-running sessions," the company writes, a shift from single-turn prompting toward workers that hang around waiting for something to happen.

The centerpiece is Subscriptions. An agent can now watch a pull request, a Slack thread, or a scheduled task, and "wakes when something happens." The example the changelog reaches for is casual: "@cursor check back in an hour and keep going until that feedback is in." Agents also subscribe automatically to PRs they open and try to drive them through to CI green, fixing failures and addressing bot comments along the way.

A new /goal command hands the agent a long-lived objective. The changelog pitches it with "fix all flaky tests and make CI green," a target the agent is meant to hold across sessions until it is done, optionally paired with a Custom Mode or a /loop for recurring check-ins. Alongside it, subagents now spin up on their own virtual machines, each getting "an isolated copy of the project with clean context in its own cloud environment," so they can fan out on parallel fixes without stepping on each other's edits.

Custom Modes let users pin any skill as a persistent chat mode via ⌥⏎ on Mac or Alt+Enter on Windows. And steering messages sent while an agent is working now "wait for the next tool call instead of cutting the agent off mid-action," a small tweak that matters more when a run might last an hour.

It is the third Cursor product post we've tracked in five days.